The white-shelled humpbacked conch snail lives under the sand around coral reefs and is around 1.8 centimetres high and 3.7-centimetres long.

One of the predators the small snail faces is the cone shell, which is capable of poisoning humans.

The cone shell creeps up on the snail, immobilises it with a poison dart and then eats it. But, says Watson, when the conch snail gets a whiff of the cone shell, it immediately leaps into action to escape the predator's poisonous dart.

"They are able to move away from the predator quite rapidly for a snail," says Watson.

The snails rapidly extend a modified foot to lift their whole shell off the ground.

"They actually jump backwards and slightly to the side as high as three or four centimetres off the ground," says Watson. "They do several of these jumps in quick succession and are able to propel themselves backward with each jump."

Watson and colleagues wanted to know whether this amazing behaviour would be affected by rising water temperatures due to global warming.

The effect of warmer water

Experiments show that as the temperature of the water increases just a few degrees, the metabolism of marine organisms increase and they use up more oxygen.

In the case of fish, when the temperature rises too high, the body is not able to take in as much oxygen as it needs and the fish experience difficulty swimming and escaping predators, says Watson.

To see what impact warming water temperatures would have on the conch snail's ability to escape predators, Watson and colleagues collected snails from the Great Barrier Reef and placed them in test tanks to measure the amount of oxygen they consumed.

The water in the tanks was heated to different temperatures including 29°C, which is normal temperature, and 34°C, which is the projected water temperature in the next 100 years, due to global warming.

Watson and colleagues injected cone shell odour into the tank and took videos of the snails jumping in response.

The researchers found that when the snails jumped they used four to five times as much as oxygen as normal.

And the animals were able to continue this level of aerobic exercise at water temperatures as high as 37°C, a temperature at which coral reef fish perish.